All the refreshment which a member has, whether breakfast, dinner, supper, or wine, are furnished to him at the _market cost_ price, all other expenses being defrayed from the annual subscriptions. For a few pounds a year, advantages are to be had, which no incomes but the most ample could procure. The Athenæum, which consists of twelve hundred members, can be taken as a good example of the rest. Among the members can be reckoned a large proportion of the most eminent persons in England--civil, military, and ecclesiastical, peers, spiritual and temporal, commoners, men of the learned professions, those connected with the sciences and arts, and commerce, as well as the distinguished who do not belong to any particular class, and who have nothing to do but live on their means, bore their tailors, and admire their family genealogy, and their own figures. These men are to be met with day after day at the clubs, living with more freedom and nonchalance than they could at their own houses. For six or eight guineas a year every member has the command of an excellent library, with maps, the daily London papers, English and foreign periodicals, and every material for writing, with a flock of gorgeous flunkies, in powder and epaulettes, to attend at the nod of a member, and a host of youthful pages in buttons and broadcloths. The club is a sort of a palace with the comfort of a private dwelling, and every member is a master without having the trouble of a master. He can have whatever meat or refreshment he desires served up at all hours, with luxury and dispatch. There is a fixed place for everything, and it is not customary to remain long at table. You can dine alone, or you can invite a dozen persons to dine with you, females being excluded. From an account kept at the Athenæum for one year, it appears that 17,323 dinners cost on an average 2s. 9-3/4d. each, and the average quantity of wine drank by each person at these dinners was a small fraction more than a pint for each. The bath accommodations are the finest that can be imagined. The kitchen of the London clubs cannot be equaled in the world, and the chief cooks who have charge of the kitchens, have each an European fame. Alexis Soyer, the greatest cook since Ude or Vatel, had, for a long time, the charge of the kitchen of the Reform Club, and the kitchen of this club, of which John Bright, and all the leaders of the English liberals are members, is the finest in London. A description of this kitchen will in a measure answer for that of any other London club, and I will give it here for the information of those who are curious in such matters.